> Pulse on the keys: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- When Gryzor asked me to write a little about myself, I was at a loss as to what I thought people would be interested in..... I have contributed to this CD with both music and software (Impulse Tracker), so I thought I'd write about these two areas. But first the standard stuff: My real name is Jeffrey Lim - I'm from Adelaide (South Australia.. where the Grand Prix used to be held). I'm 18 years old and I'm currently studying 2nd year Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Adelaide. I go by the alias Pulse (no duh!), and I'm part of the demogroup Priests of Power (PoP), originally being recruited purely to compose music. We haven't released any mind-blowing demos and unfortunately, but we made a fun demo called MMMMmmmm Donuts, which you will be unable to find without severe difficulties :) ============================================================================ Music ============================================================================ Music Background. I think I have a reasonably solid music background - I learnt the piano for about 4 or 5 years (got to Grade 6). I'm still learning the violin (completed all the grades 1->8, and the Associate and Licentiate diploma levels... so yeah, officially I'm already "Jeffrey Lim ATCL LTCL"). I've also completed the music theory at up to grade 8, Associate and Licentiate, but it must be remembered that this is all CLASSICAL music theory (ie. what's a drum beat?). I also did music in matric (the final level of high school) and managed to get the top mark for the state for the practical component (199/200).. but blah, I'm straying... Computer stuff. My first experience with composing was when Scream Tracker 3.01? was released. Here, I found a program that I could simply write music containing several instruments - and I could do it on my 386 with only a SBPro! (as opposed to some super-duper, super-expensive MIDI setup) Just like almost any newcomer to the scene, I quickly messed around with about 10 songs (only distributing 1 in the end, because all the others were quite awful, but in retrospect, that one wasn't too flash hot itself). At that time, there was little tracked music around, and although my music wouldn't be considered spectacular nowadays, it was good enough to catch the attention of a few local people. A long period of time went by..... Then I got an iNet account! And that's when I discovered just how much stuff was around to listen to. And I realised that there were hundreds of other people who wrote music 2. I contacted Gene Wie (Psibelius, head of former group Epinicion), and asked whether I could make a contribution to the BLT music disk. He accepted, of course. (The "of course" bit was due to the very aim of the Epinicion group, which was to create an avenue through which *ANY* musician could distribute their music). That contribution was "To Reach Quests' End", which is the same song that you see on this CD. More recently, I've had trouble finding the time to complete songs. I still track, but often I lack the ability to finish what I've started! I've got over seventy songs on my HDD, a majority of which aren't finished. I normally spend a LONG time over my songs - To Reach Quests' End took over 20hrs - and instead, I've been spending the time programming Impulse Tracker; you can find v1.05 on this CD! About the songs. To Reach Quests' End. This is easily my favourite of all the songs that I've written. It was started because there was a diskmag in the works and music was required! I had no inspiration for the first 10 orders, but I had the idea that I wanted to write something "so beautiful that it'd make you weep". Well, I don't think I got anywhere close to that goal, but I *AM* pleased with the result anyway. After tracking for about 2 hours, I decided I'd try to do something in the blues scale - something which I've never done before. And somehow, I managed to put together the two patterns in the middle of the piece.. and I spent absolutely ages after that trying to connect the two parts decently! Forged in Faith. This song was written in the two days preceding the original deadline for the Algorhythm '95 (South) Australian music competition. I was stuffing around when I decided that I hadn't completed a song in ages, and I better try to... Looking back, the main instrument it a little too harsh for my liking, but I can't modify it - I lack the patience to go through it again and finish it off properly. Twilight Tears. This is just a very simple (and very short) piece that I wrote as a demo song for v1.00 of Impulse Tracker to show the idea of virtual channels. Nothing really spectacular here. ============================================================================ Programming ============================================================================ I loved ST3 - it was a great program, but from the start, there was one thing that really, really annoyed me with ST3, and that was that it could only do absolute left and absolute right pannings. Yeah, you got used to it after a while, but when other people listened, they almost always pointed it out. At the time, this was not a sufficient reason to code an entire tracker! Someone else would program a tracker which panned properly... Then Fast Tracker 2 appeared, and it had proper panning! And it had envelopes, and it had 8 OR 16 bit samples, AND envelopes. Although I loved the ideas in FT2, I just couldn't get used to the interface. Not when I was 'treated' to ST3 before. I wanted something that had an interface like ST3 with FT2's features! But again, there was little point.. someone else would program a tracker with these features... (laziness rules!) But after listening to several MIDI songs on a proper MIDI setup, I realised that the only 'real' difference in sound quality between MIDI and MOD could be attributed to the fact that MOD music immediately cuts a note when another note is played in the same channel! And here was an idea which I felt could make a real difference to the quality of tracked music, and the simplicity of composing decent tracked music. I realised that the idea of the NNAs (explained in the Impulse Tracker DOCs) would exclude the format from many games and demos (which have software mixing) due to the processing required by the computer, but then again, I noticed that most of the releases nowadays are purely musical, and use many more channels than they really needed to - for both ease of composing and overall sound. So after this idea, I tried out several trackers, tried to understand their major features and slowly started the tedious process of coding IT... Coding Background. My very, very first coding experience was with BASIC, way back when BASIC still had line numbers! And I learnt (taught myself) how to write: 10 PRINT "Hello World" 20 GOTO 10 Wow. After about 2 months with BASIC, I stopped coding for a very long time - BASIC was very frustrating. About 5 years later, I decided to learn C/C++. I got a few books, and read through MOST of it.. and finished off with a reasonable working knowledge of C/C++ C was much better than BASIC :) After 2 months, I was still coding in C, but there were parts of the programs that ran at less than an acceptable speed. And the programs DID seem a bit larger than they should have been for what they did! In the back of one of the C books, there was an introduction to assembler. After playing around with DOS' DEBUG for a very short time, I found I could create smaller and more efficient programs than what I could before! And so I started my first ASM program: A S3M module player. After 3 days, I had it playing in SB-mono, with no effects programmed in :) About two weeks later, I managed to finish the player with almost all effects implemented... (This was all done in the period before my final exams at school when we're all supposed to be working hard towards our future and getting a decent mark! Ooops.... :) ) And thus finished my first non-trivial program in assembler. :) Coding Impulse Tracker. The coding for Impulse Tracker was supposed to start very soon after finishing the player, but I managed to waste about 3 months of holidays (after the final year of school) before starting to code it seriously. And when I did start coding the first time, the program would not have worked. In fact, the final program was the result of the third-retry of coding the tracker! The first couple of times, the program had an insuf- ficient structure to support the whole program. And if I managed to finish it with these, then the file would have been unacceptably large (since I'm using conventional memory, it *DOES* matter.. you wouldn't have had any memory with which you could load songs!) The program was originally written in fully 8086-compatible assembler. The reason for this was that I saw the program Galaxy Player, which claimed it could support 4 channels at 22kHz on an XT! And I thought that if that were possible, then I should try as much as possible to support pre-386 computers. Versions 1.04 and above REQUIRE a 386+, since they use 386+ code to achieve samples > 64k and 16 bit samples (earlier versions had a 64k sample limit and only supported 8 bit samples). The reason why I adopted ST3's interface was because it was *MY* preferred interface. Also, there were no other trackers around which had such an interface with the more advanced features (there are many trackers with a protracker like in...
Alek_NGI